Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
ALAN LIGHTMANI would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.
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The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.
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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
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He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back?
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
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